Why Matt Damon, Starring in The Odyssey, Claims it Was by Far and Away His Toughest Film

Matt Damon has starred in over 50 films in his 35 years plus career. But he claims that filming the Odyssey was by far away the most difficult of his career.

Damon claims that director Christopher Nolan told him in advance that this would be a very hard movie to film. “ To his credit,” Damon claimed, “that was very accurate.”

First, Damon needed to get an amazing shape, dropping to 167 pounds while adding muscle for the role. This was somewhere between 20 and 25 pounds less than his usual weight. Interestingly, by doing this, he realized that his relationship with gluten was causing him issues, so he became a gluten-free person.

Next, virtually nothing in the film was done on the green screen, with everything being shot on real world locations. That meant rain, wind, rough seas, etc. which make the film show visually amazing, but are also incredibly difficult to shoot since everything revolves around conditions that must be taken into consideration and often significant challenges to the filming process.

Also, the film was shot entirely in IMAX. These large format cameras also create an amazing visual but can only handle about two minutes of film at a time, so that for any scene longer than two minutes, the actors would have to freeze their lines while the new film was loaded, which can take up to five minutes, and then back up a few lines and then continue the scene. As you can imagine, this provided significant challenges for the longer scenes.

It’ll be interesting to see how this large budget extravaganza fares in the theaters, especially with the film’s length of two hours and 52 minutes, which with today’s audience’s short span, could prove to be a challenge. But it’s this reporter’s opinion that it will score big at the box office.

The movie is scheduled for release Friday, July 17, so we’ll find out soon enough…